


Star Foam

by lemurious



Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Gen, Grief/Mourning, Silmarils, Survival, Tolkien Gen Week - Freeform, War, War of Wrath
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-17
Updated: 2020-07-17
Packaged: 2021-03-05 04:53:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,088
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25328857
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lemurious/pseuds/lemurious
Summary: Hiding on the shores of Beleriand, Elwing considers the price and the worth of survival.
Comments: 7
Kudos: 11
Collections: Tolkien Gen Week 2020





	Star Foam

**Author's Note:**

> Started for Tolkien Gen Week 2020, but then it took a mind of its own and needed a few extra days to be wrangled into shape.

Crouching behind a boulder, she is grimy, thirsty, covered in scratches, worried about them getting infected with no water to clean them on this rocky cliff, and still determined to outlast everyone. The Silmaril is hanging in its casing around her neck. In spite of the alloy specially made by the Naugrim to protect her from the burning light, there is a mass of scar tissue under it. Elwing absent-mindedly rubs her chest, she has not been free of the pain since she was barely old enough to learn her family tree - at which point its branches suddenly came to life, tearing into each other in mindless rage, until only a few buds remained.

Elwing puts a rock into her mouth to get the saliva running, but thirst is hard to ignore when it is turning her head into a mush. It makes her remember old stories, the sound of some kindly Elven voice lulling her to sleep at Menegroth. “And then Varda, the Kindler, filled the heavens with a shower of stars, and when your grandmother was born there was no Sun or Moon riding the skies, just gentle starlight falling over the trees, protecting her from all evil by her own mother’s command…” Not that starlight could ever reach those caves.

The second day on the run with no sleep, and she has to dig her nails into her scars to stay alert. Her Eldar body can, will hold. She knows she has a choice, but it is no choice to her, has never been. She will choose immortality. Survival. As the designated heiress and the bearer of the Silmaril, she was forced into the life of a consummate survivor, a refugee from wars beyond count, before having any choice in the matter. Now it is as much a part of her as her sickly pallor from the years in the caves, as her voice, forever molded into shrillness like a cry of a seabird after the weeks she spent weeping at the loss of her brothers.

Night has come at last. Lifting her head in a daze from thirst and exhaustion, Elwing watches the shores of a river of stars beckoning on a summer night, glittering foam stretched across the skies. She thinks, _my parents only meant to call me gentle as starlight, white as foam, a sweet child to be doted on. But they mixed the sea and stars in my name, and that was their mistake. Because before I fell for E_ _ärendil in our shared loneliness of orphans of war, I gave my love to the skies, more true than any Elf or mortal could ever wrangle out of me…._

She can almost feel the taste that she had always imagined, embers and iron at the back of her throat, as the Void would expand below her feet. How she would fly, on wings of feathers, or skin, or gears and steel. In broken grace of a bat in flight, like that winged messenger of Morgoth’s. Or in her own creation, a ship to sail the stars. Elwing likes to toy with the idea that there is a drop of Fëanorian blood in her, a determination to reach for the flames with the pure conviction that burning would be worth it. She carries the fire already, and has the burns to prove it. On her chest. In her heart, the twin wounds that will never scab over.

She had learned to love her children with fierceness and imagination that had previously been reserved for the stars alone. In an unspoken pact with Eärendil they wrapped their sons in stories of wealth and glory and refused to make them children of war. The family would dine in empty halls, covered in tapestries woven through with gold, finest silver and porcelain, lit by crystal chandeliers, giving a magic, eerie quality to the fish soup and fried turnips that was their daily fare.

After Eärendil left, the twins would sleepily point at the constellations, sated after eating her portion together with their own, and Elwing would follow their fingers, dizzy with hunger and longing for her husband, their father. For the one who decided that he would rather die in the waves searching for the shores of Valinor than fighting through the slow days of defeat here in the Havens. Eärendil did not give her a choice, and Elwing had not been planning to forgive him for it, but perhaps he could not have survived what she had. The creeping realization that their children had been lost among the twisted, snarling boughs of Middle-Earth, and will never be found, the same as her brothers, though this time her grief remains too vast for weeping.

She will see all four of them in Mandos, and likely, before too long. Once she finally gets to that Vala, Elwing is going to curse him with all her power of a mother, a daughter, a sister, a survivor of an age of war. It is entirely too easy to traffic in dooms and oaths without having to watch your parents gasp for air dying at your feet, without even being able to remember whether the last words you said to your brothers – or your children – were of love.

But despite grief and hunger, and the war that had been lost before she was born, Elwing is not ready to go to Mandos, not yet. Too much beauty remains in this land, broken and battle-scarred as it is. So she finally sneaks away from the rocks for a chance to find at least a spring of water.

Turning into the woods, she sees them erupt in embers and iron. The false dawn of a forest set aflame and the steel in the left hand of her enemy. Her family, she could almost see how they would greet each other in another life, _as if we had enough family left alive that we could still afford fighting over oaths that should be long dead._ And Elwing runs.

Back toward the cliffs, tripping over her feet in exhaustion, blinded by glittering stars twirling in the skies above, reflected in the white foam below, and all her grief is suddenly drowned in a wild, glistening kind of joy, as she sets her sight on the horizon, away from sharp rocks sticking out of the surf, away from fire and swords starting to surround her, to the exact line where the sea meets the sky, and realizes, _this must be the price of wings._

**Author's Note:**

> (My headcanon is that Elwing's love for Eärendil was shaped out of the need to be understood by another orphan forced to grow up in a war, but given a different set of circumstances, she would have been happiest alone - though she was never truly allowed to have a choice about her own fate.)


End file.
